The Square was formed between the years 1716 and 1720. Being part of that great property which came to Harley, second Earl of Oxford, through his marriage, in 1713, with the Lady Henrietta Cavendish Holles, heiress of John, Duke of Newcastle. It was at first intended to call it Oxford Square, and only a loyal afterthought was responsible for its present designation. Notwithstanding that it has almost entirely lost that residential character with which it began its fashionable career, there luckily survive some of the original houses--Nos. 17 and 18 being cases in point--but the majority have been rebuilt out of all knowledge. To-day in these are found clubs, fashionable dressmakers, learned societies, anything you will but private residents; but in past times it held its own with any of the West End squares in the celebrity and importance of its inhabitants. For instance, No. 13, known as Harewood House, which until recently was associated with the Royal Agricultural Society, was built by William Adam for the bibliophilic Duke of Roxburgh. Its present name was given it when the Earl of Harewood purchased it in 1795, and it remained in his family for just upon a century. At what was formerly numbered 15, but now 17, lived Mrs. Jordan, the beautiful and talented actress who fascinated the Duke of Clarence, afterwards William IV. Angelica Kauffmann was employed to decorate the principal ceiling here, and marbles from Italy were used in the formation of the beautiful mantelpieces. Next door (now No. 18), where, in 1824, Sir John Malcolm inaugurated the Oriental Club, was, from 1771, for ten years occupied by Lord Le Despenser, who, as Sir Francis Dashwood, was one of the most notorious of that band of Medmenham monks, whose “Hell Fire Club,” with its orgies, in which John Wilkes was one of the protagonists, was the scandal of the day. When the Oriental Club was formed the house was rebuilt, in 1827, by the Wyatts, for its accommodation. Another important house in the Square was Downshire House, built in 1793, and once the residence of Lord Hillsborough. To-day it is a Bank; but in 1835 Prince Talleyrand was living here, and its walls may have heard some of the brilliant “_mots_” which this extraordinary man was wont to enunciate in what Sydney Smith described as “gurgling, not talking.” Yet another celebrated individual is associated with the place, for, after Talleyrand’s departure, Earl Grey, the hero of the great Reform Bill, lived here for a time. Two doors off once resided Lord Palmerston; not the “Pam” of the satirists and whilom Prime Minister, but his father; while later the Duchess of Brunswick, sister of George III., died in the same house in 1813.